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Re: Interaction with tab panels

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From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Aug 4, 2016 9:58AM

JP Jamous wrote:
"Please, give me my dropdown menus again. The ribbon is terrible and even sighted folks agree with me. Most of them including programmers do not like the ribbon bar."

One key fault of the ribbon bar GUI becomes very evident when viewed on a large, wide-screen monitor: there's too much distance the eye must track from the far left edge to the far right edge. This is the eye-tracking distance. Some monitor setups force the user to not just move their eyes left-to-right over this long distance, but actually turn their heads from left to right, like watching a tennis match.

It's worse for those using screen enlargers. This factor about the GUI is tiring and puts a psychological barrier in the user's mind.

On the other hand, drop-down menus don't force such an extreme eye-tracking distance on the user.

Also, when a MS ribbon bar menu is viewed on a narrower monitor (or with a lower resolution setting), the far right side of the ribbons are collapsed into unrecognizable icons or mini drop down menus. This is confusing and makes it difficult to find the utility or function you're looking for. It's especially bad for those of us who teach, moving from our personal computers to all kinds of projection systems at different resolutions. Our MS ribbon bars morph into something unrecognizable while we're presenting to several hundred people.

A similar thing happens with Adobe's top panels in InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, so it's not just a Microsoft thing. It's becoming a common design theme throughout the computer interface design community.

--Bevi Chagnon